"WARNING: We are not responsible for: Loss of sanity Loss of hair Loss of sleep"

— box cover

What long-time gamers will ultimately remember about the Lemmings games is their ingenuity. How many different ways are there to endanger the lives of a band of green-haired rodents willing to tromp blindly along whatever paths you lay for them? Thousands. In game after game, the developers, DMA Design (you probably know them better by their later name, Rockstar North), proved they could come up with hundreds of variations on this simple theme.

It works like this. Each stage of the game is either a labyrinth or a Death Trap (and frequently both). A gate opens somewhere on the level and begins to release lemmings into the stage one by one, who mindlessly walk forward into whatever awaits them, whether it means falling down a Bottomless Pit, into water, fire or lava, or any number of actual traps. Enter you, the player, armed with a cursor and a set of very limited tools for altering the lemmings' behavior. Your task is to make the critters traverse each screen towards a specific exit without letting too many of them get splatted, scorched, sliced, beheaded, or otherwise killed in the process. The solution to a level could be devilishly hard to find, and until you did, you had to put up with the sight of your adorable little lemmings meeting their maker by the dozen. The bizarre combination of cutesy graphics, mind-bending puzzles, and grisly, relentless death of the pixelated creatures no doubt left many a seventh-grader scarred for life.

For the first game, at least, there were eight tools available for the purposes of getting the hapless lemmings to the exit:

Climber — Lemmings with the climber skill will climb up any vertical wall in their path, rather than turning around. One of the two persistent skills that lasts the entire level.

Floater — These lemmings possess an umbrella which allows them to fall any distance without splatting. One of the two persistent skills that lasts the entire level.

Applying both of the above would lead to the character being called Athlete.

Bomber — After a five-second countdown, the bomber explodes, taking out nearby walls and obstacles. Naturally, the lemming doesn't survive the process. Called the Exploder in some ports and in Lemmings 2: The Tribes (where Bomber is a different skill entirely).

Blocker — The blocker stands in place, preventing other lemmings from passing by. However, once set, the blocker cannot be removed except by blowing him up or digging the floor out from under him.

Builder — The builder constructs a short diagonal stairway out of bricks, allowing him to cross gaps and get other lemmings to elevated positions.

Basher — The basher punches through walls, creating a horizontal tunnel through an obstacle until it hits air or a steel wall (or it's told to do something else).

Digger — Similar to the above two, only the digger employs its claws to dig straight down.

Sure, the puzzles are simple — at first. In one stage, you might have to turn your lemmings into "Diggers" and burrow through the soft soil to the exit. In another, you might have to use the "Blocker" skill to keep the lemmings from walking off cliffs, or the "Builder" skill to allow them to climb one. But by the time you get to around level 20 or so, you'll be staring at the screen and saying "Now, wait a second. There's just no way to solve this one. They must have made a mistake!"

They didn't. Like few others, these games reward cleverness, persistence, and non-linear thinking and keep you coming back for more.

Xmas Lemmings, a series of Christmas-themed Mission Pack Sequels. The first two installments were brief four-level demos, followed by a full game (and then a year later, an expanded version of that game).

Oh No! More Lemmings, another Mission Pack Sequel, except this time, all difficulty modes besides the lowest were Nintendo Hard. Lampshaded in the level titled AAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!. Some ports of the original Lemmings contain this game as a bonus, and the most recent PC release (Lemmings for Windows 95—yeah, it's been a while) bundles both together.

Lemmings 2: The Tribes is the biggest and most true-feeling sequel to the original game, adding more skills to the lemmings' arsenal, a wide range of gimmicky themed locations and changing the formula of the gameplay - rather than saving a set amount of lemmings in each level, the player has the exact same batch of lemmings for every level in each tribe, and has to let all (or all but one for a couple of tribes) of them survive for every single level.

The Lemmings Chronicles removed some skills and adjusted the engine, adding some Platform Game elements.

3-D Lemmings moved the classic Lemmings gameplay into 3-D.

Lemmings Revolution returned to 2-D gameplay, but with 3-D graphics, as the levels were wrapped around a cylinder. Featured two groups of colour-coded Lemmings a a time, each with different entry and exit points and able to pass over different obstacles.

Lemmings on PSP was a remake of the original, with a very nice graphical overhaul and added level editor. It was later ported to PS2 where it gained a number of Eyetoy levels where players use their body to form a path

Lemmings on the PS3 was a PSN download which returned to pure 2D. New mechanics included levels shrouded in darkness, so only the areas around torch-carrying Lemmings could be seen, bubbles that increased the number of tools you had, and clone vats that would copy the first lemming to walk by them, actually increasing the number of lemmings you have. And even more traps and ways to die.

And various spin-offs or rip-offs by other companies, that generally nobody's ever heard of, such as Critters.

Lemmings provides examples of the following tropes:

Aborted Arc: Lemmings 2: The Tribes featured 12 tribes trying to escape their doomed homeland and its sequel, Lemmings Chronicles, dealt with those same tribes colonizing a new island chain they discovered, with one island per tribe. Chronicles followed three of the tribes from Lemmings 2: the Classic, Shadow, and Egyptian tribes. The other nine were supposed to be handled in subsequent sequels, but Tribes arc was abandoned after Chronicles and subsequent games pretty much pretend it never happened.

Anti-Frustration Features: The Java-based clone Lemmini contains several, including a fast-forward button, the ability to assign tasks while the game is paused, a replay feature that repeats the previous performance and allows the player to take over right before the point where they messed up before, and arrow key shortcuts that highlight only walkers or Lemmings walking in a certain direction. Not only does it make some levels in the original games much easier, it also makes possible custom levels requiring a degree of precision that would have been downright unfair in older versions of the game.

For those curious, these five "SUNSOFT Specials" reappear in the Genesis version as the following levels:

SUNSOFT 27, Two heads are better...

SUNSOFT 29, I am A.T.

Present 29, Private room available

Present 30, Final impediment

Mayhem 30, Lemmings' ark

Choose Your Own Adventure: Two gamebooks, based on The Tribes, were published. Success revolved around choosing the right selection of abilities to bring into each area.

The Coconut Effect: Obviously, the Lemmings' behaviour is closer to the public idea of lemmings than reality. Lemmings don't actually rush to death in mass suicide, but they do move in extremely large numbers when necessary. While doing so they may cross bodies of water and some of them will drown, resulting in the legend of mass suicide. (Also, they don't have green hair and blue outfits, and it's very difficult to teach them to build bridges.)

Critical Existence Failure: Falling is like this for Lemmings. There are only two outcomes - walk away completely unharmed or spatter into a gory, pixellated mess. Lampshaded in the instruction manuals, which point out that the difference between the two is a single pixel.

Lemmings 3D attempted to address this by adding an additional level between these two: if it's a height big enough that they shouldn't walk out completely unscathed, but not big enough to kill them outright, the lemmings will fall down unconscious on impact and remain like this for a few seconds before getting up and continuing as normal.

The Fun levels and the first half of Tricky have a relatively gentle curve where you normally have 20 of every skill and just have to endure more and more complicated layouts, something a novice can generally get through without too many problems. Once you hit Tricky 15 though, the difficulty climbs very quickly, as you are introduced to levels that require precision bombing (without the aid of Blockers) and lateral thinking.

The first 20 levels of Oh No! More Lemmings are painfully easy and can be solved with minimal effort. Once you get out of the Tame difficulty setting, however, the game instantly becomes Nintendo Hard and doesn't let up until you've finished.

In Lemmings 2: The Tribes, generally, the ten levels of each tribe gradually increase in difficulty. However, for some reason, the game designers saw fit to make the painfully hard "Snow More Lems" the third level of the Polar Tribe.

Driven to Suicide: The Lemme Fatale in Chronicles uses her Compelling Voice to cause any Lemmings who come near her to fall madly in love, then kill themselves a few seconds later.

Dummied Out: Many ports don't include the unique Shout-Out levels or the All the 6's level. Also, these ports tend not to include the music tracks based on "How much is that Doggie in the Window" and "Little Town of Bethlehem".

The crystal tile-set contains a functional shredder trap that does not appear in any of the official levels.

Dungeon Bypass: Multiple levels can be solved in a completely unintended way, e.g. by bashing inside the floor and under the whole level. (This is the mildest example; often, these backroutes require the use of Good Bad Bugs. Sometimes, they are also more difficult [or MUCH more difficult] than the regular solution, but allow you to save more lemmings.) There's also at least one completely intentional alternate solution: "Cascade" (see below).

Embedded Precursor: Lemmings Paintball came bundled with Windows-compatible versions of the original Lemmings and Oh No! More Lemmings. Arguably, more people bought the game for this bonus than for the featured game, especially since ONML had already fallen out of print at the time.

Everybody Lives: Always an aim, but equally not always possible - making a lemming a bomber is a death sentence, and most blockers are just as doomed. An early level in 3D Lemmings called "Hole in Ten" requires you to save all (ten) of your lemmings. It also, however, requires a blocker. The solution? Cross back, liberate him from his platform, and guide him to the exit just like everybody else. Luckiest blocker in the game. Just this once, everybody lives!

Similarly, in Mayhem Level 20 of the original game, the only solution involves using a blocker and later saving him. For many players, this is where they first discovered that doing so is even possible.

Chronicles used this as a selling point - it was the first game in the series where it was always possible to save every Lemming in the stage, if you were careful (and, occasionally, pick up a few more along the way).

Fake Difficulty: The randomness that arises from trying to assign a skill to a lemming out of a large group moving in opposite directions. Bashing through the wrong wall, for example, could easily send the entire group plummeting to their doom.

In 3D Lemmings, one tool allowed you to click on a specific lemming amidst a group to highlight it, and then assign a skill.

In Lemmings Revolution, you can pause the game and zoom in really close, making it a lot easier.

In the first game, there's a level with a hidden exit, which is easily memorized. (Fortunately, it is also easily found.) In "Oh No! More Lemmings", there is a level with TWO entrances and exits, but one of each are hidden from view and you have to find them. (Again, easily remedied, especially with the mini-map.)

Family-Unfriendly Death: The Lemmings can die in rather graphic ways such as being crushed under building bricks, smashed into the ground by the Potato Beast with blood squirting from under his fist, and picked up by the Buzzard with the top hat that tears its head off and crushes it under its talons with blood spraying everywhere from the victim's headless body.

Feelies: Lemmings 2 (the Amiga version at least) included a prologue in the form of an honest-to-god, colour-illustrated children's book about the somewhat inept Jimmy B. McLemming's mission to warn the other tribes to bring their talismans. McLemming's exploits continued in the manual for the sequel, Lemmings Chronicles, before the entire storyline was dropped from the franchise.

Fighting for a Homeland: After their own homeland is destroyed in Lemmings 2, the Lemming tribes have to colonize an island chain in Lemmings Chronicles and free said islands from roaming monsters.

Genre-Busting: Games of this style are still relatively rare. (They're most commonly called "save-'em-ups.")

Wicked 2, Introducing SUPERLEMMING. The lone lemming moves twice as fast - the last part of the level requires a lot of quick-fire skill setting as a result.

Havoc 10, Flow Control. Only one lemming is actually assigned a skill (a Builder), but to achieve the required percentage saved, you have to constantly turn the release rate up and down to control the flow of lemmings from the trapdoor.

Hard Mode Filler: The first game was particularly bad about making you replay early levels, only with the challenge made more difficult in some way, usually by either shortening the amount of time you have to complete the level or giving you a more limited set of skills to work with (or both). Sort of an inversion, in fact, as the hard versions were created first. However, the designers realized they needed a lot more easy levels than what they had, so they took a lot of the hard ones they had created and reduced the difficulty, then placed the easy levels first in the game.

Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Each level designer had a different theme for the names they gave their levels. Mike Dailly's titles were hints to what the player needed to do, while Gary Timmons made titles based on pop culture references.

Luck-Based Mission: Mayhem Level 24, "All or Nothing", which is a one in eight chance of victory on certain platforms. In versions which allow you to assign skills to Lemmings walking in a specific direction, this level becomes disgustingly easy. There is a trick to make the level ridiculously easy. Move the cursor to the side opposite of which you want to bash, and click as far to that side as possible.

Nostalgia Level: The Classic Tribe in Lemmings 2, complete with skills, backgrounds and music from the original game. More subtly, they explode like the originals (they explode into shrapnel and don't affect nearby Lemmings) and don't have the period of being stunned when falling which was also a new addition for the sequel.

Not the Fall That Kills You: If you can turn a lemming into a Floater before impact with the ground, you're golden. Doesn't matter how close it was.

Also, even without a Floater, it's possible for a Lemming to survive a fall with no injury provided the fall doesn't exceed a certain distance. (The manual for the original game even says that the difference between a Lemming going "Splat" and a Lemming walking away from a fall can be a single pixel.)

Number of the Beast: The infamous Tricky Level 21, "All the 6's......", removed or renamed in several versions. The level takes the shape of three giant 6s, the Lemmings have 66 of each skill, 66% of 66 Lemmings must be saved, and the player has, you guessed it, 6 minutes to save them. The title is a reference to Bingo.

One-Hit-Point Wonder: Lemmings cannot survive anything. Except for walking. And some falls. And explosions caused by other lemmings.

Obviously Evil: The iconic spinning shredder traps that first appear on Fun 9 are very clearly something you should not walk near.

Parasol Parachute: The Floater lemmings, who can survive long drops by using their umbrellas as parachutes.

Pause Scumming: In Revolution, when you blow up a lemming with the "bomber" command, just before exploding, the lemming in question crouches. If you pause while he's crouching, you can give him another command (like "build") and thus save him from exploding. This trick is absolutely necessary on some of the later levels in which you must save every single lemming.

Pixel Hunt: Two forms. One, one of the ways to avoid the problem mentioned in Luck-Based Mission was to find perfect placement for the crosshairs such that it would only let you select a lemming going the correct direction. Two, choosing where, exactly, to initiate a given job (most notably, builders and miners, although any other than climbers and floaters could run into this) could be the difference between success and failure in later levels, so finding the perfect pixel to use a job could be maddening on harder levels.

Some examples from the first game: "The Cancan Song" (Offenbach), "Dance of the Little Swans" (Tchaikovsky), "Dance of the Reed Flutes" (Tchaikovsky), "Alla Turca" (Mozart), "London Bridge Is Falling Down" (traditional), and "She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain" (traditional). ("Dance of the Reed Flutes" (aka "Dance of the Toy Flutes", aka "Dance of the Mirlitons") is probably best known in Britain as "Everyone's a Fruit and Nut Case". That may be why DMA included it.)

For the Genesis version, the Present difficulty sits between Mayhem and SUNSOFT, and is much easier than either of them - more on par with Taxing.

In the vanilla version, this makes a slight appearance in that some of the later Tricky levels are harder than the early Taxing levels.

The Taxing level "Take a running jump..." is far easier than most Tricky levels if one knows how. The "official" solution (as featured in most walkthroughs) is to sacrifice the leading lemming to plug the tiny gap at the right, thereby preventing the rest from climbing onto a ledge and falling from there to their deaths; but it's much easier to build a landing ramp going under the ledge, which makes the drop non-fatal and incidentally makes it possible to save all lemmings, rather than all but one.

Schmuck Bait: Any level that requires you to save 100% and still gives you the Bomber skill. Although you can save bombers in Revolutions, as mentioned under Pause Scumming.

Sequence Breaking: Some of the harder levels have quite intricate solutions that give you just enough tools to carry through, but fall victim to Good Bad Bugs (like being able to partially penetrate steel plates), plain ingenuity or a designer oversight that allows quicker completion with tools left over. Fan-made level designers coined the term 'backroute' for any solution to a level that they did not intend, the metaphor being that a house owner tries to make it as difficult as possible to get in through the front, but leaves a back door open. A nice showcase would be this playthrough of SUNSOFT 19 of the Genesis version.

Four levels in the original Amiga release (and its various direct ports) use graphics from and are named after other Psygnosis games of the time, including Shadow Of The Beast, Menace, Awesome, and Shadow of the Beast II. In addition, many of the level names contain pop culture references, especially in ONML.

And the Sega Mega Drive version, developed by Sunsoft, includes an exclusive level based on Sunsoft's NES game Ufouria.

Lemmings 2: The Tribes: In most versions of the game, the Space Tribe has a rendition of "Blue Danube" as its background music, in reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey.

A number of the level names are references to films, literature or common catchphrases (often replacing an object or creature with "Lemming"); examples include:

"We all fall down" - the last line of "Ring-a-ring-a-roses".

"Origins and lemmings" - a play on "oranges and lemons".

"Luvly Jubly"- the catchphrase of Del Boy from Only Fools and Horses. Evidently, SUNSOFT did not get this chiefly British reference when they ported the game, as the level was renamed to "Lovely jubilee".

Additionally, the Polar levels in Lemmings 2, which featured slippery ice that would cause the lemmings to fall without the Skater skill.

Soundtrack Dissonance: There are songs both light and intense in the soundtrack and they get reused all over the place, but there's a noticeable tendency for some of the more frustrating levels to have something warm and poppy playing in the background.

Super Drowning Skills: Sure, some of the water looks like it could be acid, lava, or a mass of writhing weeds, but there's plain and simple blue water as well. Lemmings 2 gives you the Swimmer ability.

Timed Mission: All levels have a time limit. Most of the time it's long enough not to be an issue, although on some levels the difficulty derives from completing an otherwise-straightforward puzzle in a very short time.

Too Dumb to Live: The Lemmings, all of them. The whole point of the game is to keep them alive despite this.

Trial-and-Error Gameplay: Death traps without any indication to their existence? How nice. Bonus points for putting it a few pixels before the exit.

Unwinnable by Mistake: One of the levels in Lemmings Revolution is unwinnable; the platform the Lemmings start on is too high for them to survive the fall from, and you need to save all of them to complete the level. Do the math. It's fixable via a fanmade patch, although thankfully the nonlinear structure of the game means you never have to play the offending level in the first place.

Video Game Caring Potential: Saving 100% (or as much as possible) of the lemmings in each level, regardless of what is required for success. Just try going for the perfect solution in "Cascade" (otherwise an example of the following trope, as the obvious solution is to save 10 lemmings out of 80 and let the rest splat), or in "Upsidedown World" (at the start of which you have to turn the lemmings round on a very thin ledge — easy if you use a blocker, but then you lose one). To be specific, out of the 120 levels in the original game, 101 are possible to genuinely save every lemming on, and two more can be 100%ed via a glitch. Many of them, however, are very hard to do so.

"Oh no!" pop pop pop pop pop! In theory, the Nuke button is there to quickly shortcut to the results screen if the final result is known (either a guaranteed success or failure). From almost the beginning, players have enjoyed instead using it because they enjoy watching every lemming pop in an explosion of confetti. The chorus of "Oh no!" heard when activating this is just the satisfying icing on the cake.

It's surprisingly fun to watch them get mangled in the various traps... or fall from a great height and go SPLAT. Or to time a bomber so that they explode while falling and produce a comet.

One level from Holiday Lemmings 94requires the nuke button in order to emulate the bombers, which are not provided on that level.

It's also worth noting that almost all later versions of the game after the original Amiga version include a shortcut to skip to the results (Escape on the PC, Start+A on the Genesis, Cmd-A on the Mac, etc), making the nuke button purely for unadulterated cruelty.

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